Arsalan Ahmed (pen name) likes maps, poetry, lost causes, and the films of Satyajit Ray. He lives in Virginia.

Stubbornly, I refused to marry without Ammi’s consent, however grudging. Our conflict was one of ideas, not actions. Victory was not simply getting what one wanted, but doing so with the adversary’s blessing. She reciprocated, shunning the soap-operatic Pakistani mother’s classic move of disowning a son, never again speaking his name. Which was what an uncle of hers had done some forty years prior, when an errant son married a Canadian woman. “He never saw his son’s face again, not even from his deathbed,” Ammi said, darkly and not very subtly.

My resolve and Anne’s patience lasted two years.

Ahmed Ali Akbar is a graduate student in Islamic studies. He writes about race, class, South Asian and American Muslim history, and the notion of Islam as a vehicle for social justice. He enjoys dreaming about writing comedy, learning to play music, 8-bit punk rock, color, language, comic books, exploring his family history, and cooking.
In my teenage and college years, I tried dating. I did my best to impart Islamic ethics onto my relationships, but still, I felt guilty. I debated whether dating was inherently wrong and if it was my only option. I felt terrible about having to lie to my parents. Despite their history, they didn’t have the language to speak about young love. When I finally told Ammi, the conversation was stilted and difficult. My mother teased me. Despite her insistence to the contrary, she told my father about what I had said. He acted like he never heard anything from her.
I knew that when it came time to marry, I would talk to Ammi, who would explain everything to Abu. With her gone, I do not know how this process works.

Ibrahim Al-Marashi is assistant professor of Middle Eastern history at California State University San Marcos. He obtained his PhD at the University of Oxford, United Kingdom, completing a thesis on the 1990–1991 Gulf Crisis, part of which was plagiarized by the British government prior to the 2003 Iraq War, otherwise known as the “Dodgy Dossier.” He is currently writing a memoir on his experiences as an Iraqi American during America’s wars with Iraq. He is also the older brother of Huda Al-Marashi, author of the piece “Otherwise Engaged” in Love InshAllah: The Secret Love Lives of American Muslim Women.
The morning after first seeing the Iranian checkout girl, I awoke feeling very scholarly. I scanned the course catalogue, looking for another class to add on to my schedule. But what would I take? How about Introduction to Persian? I looked up the times it was offered. I would have to wake up at the inhumane hour of 9 a.m. three times a week. It was a lot to consider.
I tried to legitimize my actions to myself. After eight years of war with Iran, it was high time an Iraqi made the effort to learn the Persian language. Perhaps taking Persian would be inconvenient, but it might just help smooth ties between Iraqis and Iranians the world over. Besides, if I were to run into the checkout girl, and she were to hear my smooth Persian, fall in love, and soon after marry me, wouldn’t that be the greatest gift of all for our two cultures? Our children just might be the beginning of a beautiful Perso–Arab subculture.

John Austin is African American/Japanese American. He converted to Islam fifteen years ago. He is a graduate of George Mason University and runs a small interactive design company in the Washington, DC, area. When not designing, he writes fiction and essays. “Planet Zero” is his first foray into nonfiction.
I asked myself: What are you expecting? In the U.S. it isn’t often that you see an Arab woman and a black man together. Part of the reason for my flight from the U.S. was my disaffection over the state of my life as a Muslim. I had fallen off the “Muslim Wagon,” and my spiritual and social pursuits had ground to a screeching halt. I found myself isolated, with only the judgments of my supposed peers to keep me company. I had interacted with many flavors of Muslims and most of those interactions were disappointing. To some I was not strict enough. With them I faced accusations that I craved secular life because I maintained my pre-Muslim friendships and I’d gone on dates with women. Certainly I wasn’t holding out for a rishta. Why, then, invite more disappointment into my life?

Alykhan Boolani grew up in Berkeley, California. He was a high school history teacher in nearby Oakland for five years before his recent move to Brooklyn, New York, to help found a new school. He loves being a schoolteacher, and never ceases to be inspired by youth, with their uncanny abilities to resist dogma and mindfully labor toward their own truths—all with love and resilience. When not in the classroom, you can find Alykhan writing short stories, listening to Coltrane, or riding motorcycles with caution.
“Sorry—what did you ask, Chacha?”
How old are you now?—no longer a question, but an annoyed test of patience.
It was inevitable. I already knew whatever number I said would precipitate the dangerous mantra my uncle was dead set on delineating. At twenty-nine, this question is a predetermined, existential adjudication: the contextual set of evidence being that my older cousins (all twenty-six of them) are exempt from this line of questioning; that my sister is well on her way toward respectable, Isma’ili family-hood; and that here in the old country, my tawdry theories of progressive neocultural hybridization make even less sense than usual. I make eye contact with no one, grab a little Karachi banana from the center spread of postdinner fruits, and brace for the worst.
“You’re overdue,” he says.
Like rent. Like car payments. Like this banana covered in soft, brown spots.– Read more –

Arif Choudhury is a writer, filmmaker, stand-up comic, and professional storyteller. In his storytelling program entitled “More in Common than You Think,” Arif shares stories about growing up Bangladesh American Muslim in the north suburbs of Chicago and pokes fun at issues of ethnic and religious identity, assimilation, and how we think of one another. He wrote a children’s book, The Only Brown-Skinned Boy in the Neighborhood, and his short film Coloring is currently being presented in various film festivals. He lives in New York City.
If I was looking for the female version of me, why didn’t I date an American-born Bangladeshi Muslim girl? Because they were inaccessible. Growing up in the Bangladeshi community in Chicago, all of us boys and girls were raised as though we were siblings or cousins. One of the uncles in the community once asked me, “Do you feel as though you can’t marry the Bangladeshi girls you grew up with because you think of them as sisters?” “Exactly,” I replied. “It feels incestuous. They aren’t romantic possibilities. It’s too weird. I’ve been calling all of you uncle and auntie. If I marry your daughter I’d be calling you Abba and Amma—it would be strange to have you as in-laws.” Besides, I thought, you are all so freaked out about dating, how are we supposed to couple up? You would all know if we were going out to the movies or for coffee . . . or who knows what else.
Since our Bangladeshi Muslim parents wouldn’t let us date, we all dated secretly—some sooner than others. We found boyfriends and girlfriends from outside the Bangladeshi Muslim community who were allowed to date. Because of this, a lot of the American-born Bangladeshis—both men and women—in my community began marrying outside our ethnic group and sometimes outside our faith.

Mohamed Djellouli (pen name) is a wanderer who, one day while lost in the desert, stumbled upon a collection of blessed pens. He has since served as their steward through ink drawings, calligraphy, and poetry. Djellouli’s works join the seasonal streams of love and nature. When he is not drawing water for his fellow traveler, he is dancing or practicing law.
I knew that dating a Muslim woman would not be without complications. I grew up Muslim, but not typically so. I’m mixed-race; my white mother is agnostic, while my North African father is more of a secular Muslim. I grew up in San Francisco, the only Muslim among my circle of friends, not really understanding what that meant beyond having a funny name. As a young person, my only dating concern was that I wasn’t having more success picking up women.
Rabia, on the other hand, was a Lebanese American who grew up in the Gulf. And while her father and mother were relatively liberal for their family and social milieu, her baseline was far more religiously conservative than mine, especially when it came to dating. Her parents forbade her from ever spending time alone with men.
Despite our different backgrounds, religion was a subject over which we connected deeply.

Ramy Eletreby is a theater practitioner, facilitator, artist, and activist. He was born in Los Angeles as the third and youngest child of Egyptian parents. Ramy is committed to using theater as a tool for community dialogue and change. He holds an MA in Applied Theatre from the CUNY School of Professional Studies. Ramy has collaborated on community-engaged theater projects both domestically, in California and New York, and internationally, in Africa and the Middle East. Ramy has worked in prisons, schools, places of worship, riverbanks, forests, and other magical places where one would not expect to find theater.
I don’t remember what Corey and I discussed in the Jacuzzi that first night. All I remember thinking was that this was probably the first boy my own age who’d ever approached me and had a genuine curiosity about me. This beautiful guy was interested in what I had to say. He probably never realized how special he made feel in that moment. He had no idea that he was the first person who made me feel seen. I remember rushing home afterward to pray to Allah, to express gratitude for bringing Corey into my life. I think I started loving him instantly, from the moment we lowered ourselves into that hot tub. I fell quickly and I fell hard. I was so overcome with feeling that I started unraveling. There are few things as fragile as an untouched heart.

Alan Howard is an IT operations manager with a Fortune 100 Silicon Valley company. He resides in Atlanta with his son, where he enjoys mountain biking, hiking, kayaking, and reading. He is an avid traveler and loves finding new and out-of-the-way places to visit around the world.
When we met, Joan’s cancer was in remission. We didn’t want to think that it would resurface, interrupting our dreams as individuals and as a family.
A year later, I asked her father’s permission to marry her. Three months later, she moved cross-country and we married at my local mosque—nothing fancy, just a few dozen friends and my parents. I had converted to Islam during my first year of college after spending a long time battling personal demons and studying several religions. Joan converted in her own time three years later. We had little in terms of material wealth as I was still finishing up at the university, but we took trips together, talked about everything in our lives, and explored the South. We were unbelievably happy, going on long walks and holding hands, oblivious to anyone else. Exploring new foods or destinations together instead of individually was wonderful, like discovering a secret garden only we knew about.
Through Joan’s ordeal, I learned to accept that there are things that happen in this world that I do not understand and cannot control, but must face with sabr anyway. Joan’s embodiment of Islam taught me how to understand and survive the tests I have been given in life, in order to grow and change and become more beautiful….my wife’s test in this life was cancer; it changed her and made her strong. My test was to take care of her, to never turn away. It was my duty to stand by her, but it was also my love. It was the core of my humanity.

Khizer Husain runs Shifa Consulting, a global health consulting practice with a focus on health-care planning, policy, and finance in the Middle East and South Asia. He is also the president of American Muslim Health Professionals. As a 2013–2014 Education Pioneer Fellow, Khizer will provide consulting support to some of the nation’s lowest-performing schools in the Washington, DC, area. Khizer writes Muslim-themed children’s stories for the iPad app company FarFaria. He attended the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine as a Fulbright Scholar and holds degrees from the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign. Khizer lives in Alexandria, Virginia, with his wife, Zuleqa.
I want to blame Zacur, but it’s tough to hate a man like him. He’s a Norman Rockwellian doctor who probably used to make house calls early in his practice. But now I wish that he’d step out of the room. We need privacy. I know Zuleqa needs a hug. I’ve learned in our six years of marriage that hugs are the currency of love, the strongest refuge during storms. Hugs can articulate what words can’t—I am here for you, jaanu. We’ll get through this, inshAllah.
Reproductive endocrinologists are optimists. There’s always some possibility for fertility. Our fertility probability is 10 percent. Does that mean we have to try ten times harder to conceive? Is it all moot if there are no eggs? How does he know there are no eggs? Ultrasounds look like WWII–era technology for finding German U-boats. What about my side of the equation: are there legions of healthy swimmers, or a sorry mess incapable of doing the job?

A. Khan is completing a graduate degree in religious studies at Harvard University. He is interested in aesthetics, Islamic social history, theories of well-being, ethics, and the lived experiences that bring religious ideals into practice. He is grateful to all his family, past and present, for building an enduring community of love, and to his friends and teachers, past and present, who have helped him become a fuller person. He next plans to pursue some combination of clinical and research training. Long-term, he hopes to continue to be able to write while pursuing his passion for global health and travel. He has lived in the United States, Europe, the Middle East, and North Africa.
I no longer fit the “good eldest son” role for my family. This turn of events I hadn’t thought out. Inevitably, my heightened sense of clarity faded. I had thought that going through a “coming out”—like most good, queer American men of my generation—was enough. Courageous enough, illuminating enough, powerful enough. What I had invited my family into, I soon realized, was a tangled web of displacement. The unease I felt with myself did not go away, and doing the “right thing” by coming out started to feel hollow. It became harder day in and day out to walk a path of uncertainty, in the most fundamental of my relationships. My family, no matter what, was the beginning and the end of all the love in my life.

Stephen Leeper is a writer-activist and school teacher living in Oakland, California, with his wife. He graduated from the University of North Carolina at Greensboro with a BA in psychology. Currently he is an MFA candidate in writing at the California College of the Arts. His primary genres are poetry and creative nonfiction.
It was the second year after I’d moved from North Carolina to California. I had moved to escape boredom and childhood memories, leaving Ashley, my beautiful non-Muslim girlfriend, behind. We had been a couple for a few months, but had known each other for two years. She said she would leave with me “just like that”—she didn’t have to see a five-year plan or a five-digit number in my bank account. My promise was all she needed. I left North Carolina in September 2009 and started making plans for our future. By January, she had left me for her white ex-boyfriend, a blow to the Original Blackman’s ego, a carryover sentiment from my Stephen X days.
The next year was one of grief and sorrow filled with bitter, desperate crying when I got up in the morning, in my car between meetings, and in bed at night. Unlike with the Prophet, neither my uncle nor my wife had died, but my hope had, and I grieved. When I met Aliyah the following autumn, I had healed a great deal but was fucking terrified of opening up again.

Haroon Moghul’s 2006 novel, The Order of Light (Penguin) anticipated the Arab Spring; in it, a young Arab immolates himself and sparks a Middle Eastern revolution. He’s been published in Boston Review, Al-Jazeera, and Salon. In 2015, Yale University Press will publish his memoir, How to Be Muslim. Haroon has served as an expert guide to Andalucía, Istanbul, and Bosnia, sits on the Multicultural Audience Board at New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art and is a senior correspondent for Religion Dispatches. He is a PhD candidate at Columbia University and was a fellow at the New America Foundation’s National Security Studies Program.
By my senior year, the battle of immigrant Geist versus female corporeality had been decided. Not only did I want to go to prom, I wanted a date to it. She turned out to be a sophomore named Carla, who first came to my attention one day late in March. My good friend Jeremy and I were walking the senior hallway after school when Carla stepped out of a classroom she shouldn’t have been in. She stopped and looked both ways. She waved hello to him—she didn’t know me—and walked ahead of us.
Even Jeremy, ever the embodiment of propriety (and piety), muttered an “Oh, my goodness” before he noticed my staring and suggested I stop. This I liked Jeremy for: he treated religion religiously. A man of God, but one who danced and dated, and so he threw me for a loop. When I admitted to Jeremy I was smitten by Carla’s Italian genes, her stonewashed jeans, and her striped green tank top, he swore to help me make the leap from fantasy to reality.– Read more –

Randy Nasson is not a New York Times best-selling author but will be one step closer if you purchase this book. Originally from the Boston area, Randy is a software product manager based in San Francisco, where he lives with his wife and son.
For years I kept my own family at arm’s length in pursuit of a fierce independence from intrusion, concern, guilt, or anything that would complicate my pursuit of self-indulgence. I was always looking for a good opportunity or a good time, and if you didn’t want to come along with me that was fine as long as you didn’t stand in my way.
That’s not to say that I never forged any meaningful relationships. But looking back, I recognize that when the people closest to me were in need, I wasn’t able to fully listen or be present because I was self-consumed, worried about how I was being impacted or busily formulating a response instead of focusing on the other person.
Over the next few weeks, Ayesha recovered, though we never received a firm diagnosis. A victory, but still shallow and incomplete, like my resolution to be a better husband.

Zain Omar grew up in Leicester, England, and San Diego, California. He studied management science at the University of California, San Diego, and currently works in the online marketing industry in Los Angeles. In his free time, Zain likes to spend time with his lovely wife, play soccer (both on the PlayStation and in real life), and hang out with friends and family.
I often think awkwardness is my superpower. No one else I know has such a deft way of turning an ordinary situation into a hot mess of confusion and apprehension…
I like to think that AwkwardMan could be a new superhero—maybe not one invited to the same parties as Batman and Superman, but definitely part of the nerdy group that includes Quailman and Captain Planet. I imagine that my superhero cape would be just a little too long and loose fitting, something that would get caught in a doorway as I made my triumphant entrance to catch the bad guys. Then, as I stumbled clear, it would rip in half. Not to be deterred, I’d attempt to halt them with a catchy and powerful tagline, but mispronounce a word or have trouble projecting the phrase loudly enough, and they’d stop briefly, struggling to understand what I’d said. “AwkwardMan Inconveniences Bad Guys!” would be my signature headline in the newspapers.

Dan I. Oversaw (pen name) is a Boston-based doctor of religious studies and pop culture scholar whose wonderful family nevertheless cherishes their privacy. He writes both academic and creative works across a variety of media, lectures nationally on the engagement of pop culture and religion, and teaches throughout the Greater Boston area. The atomic Reform Jewish family of his childhood now also includes Catholics, Presbyterians, Mennonites, agnostics, atheists, and, of course, Muslims—all of whom get along dandily. In cryptological circles, “Dan” made a name for himself by decoding the Iliad.
Until Muna, I had been in retreat. I had been thinking of leaving grad school, of going home to Boston. Life outside of my college cocoon had rubbed me raw. It was all the usual stuff, I suppose: working for an income, living on my own, and having no social safety net. What made it especially hard for me was the well-hidden, very shameful anxiety disorder that I had been combatting since adolescence—a crippling panic that would sometimes grab me, the frenzied loss of control that plagued me. Over the years, I immersed myself in film, books, television, and popular culture as a method of casually combating it, but it was too big and too daunting to maintain so far from home. It left me safe nowhere and comfortable with no one. With such a primal fear always ready to erupt, it was difficult to feel fully human.

Sam Pierstorff received his master of fine arts degree in creative writing from California State University, Long Beach. He went on to become the youngest poet laureate ever appointed in the state of California when he was selected to the position in 2004 by the city of Modesto. He currently teaches English at Modesto Junior College. His debut poetry collection, Growing Up in Someone Else’s Shoes, was published by World Parade Books in 2010, and most recently, he edited More Than Soil, More Than Sky: The Modesto Poets, which reached number 1 on Amazon’s poetry best-seller’s list upon its release.
In college, among my Muslim male friends, which, alhamdulillah, I had plenty of at Long Beach State University, no one talked about masturbation or virginity. We all just assumed they both existed in our lives. The running joke was that every Muslim male was Hanafi until he got married because the Hanafi school made masturbation permissible, but only to prevent zina or to release sexual tension (not just desire). Otherwise, it was forbidden. I never asked, but I am pretty sure my male Muslim friends released a lot of sexual “tension” in college. I read somewhere that 99 percent of men do it, and the other 1 percent lie about it. We were the 1 percent. Muslim men, growing up in the United States of pornography and booty shorts, are not immune. Guilt ridden? Yes. Overflowing with regret and shame? Perhaps. Full of prayers for greater strength in the face of temptation? Every Jumma. But definitely not immune.

Yusef Ramelize is a New York City–based activist and graphic designer. He is the founder of HomelessForOneWeek.com, an initiative he began in 2009 to raise awareness about the homeless epidemic in New York City. He has raised over $10,000 for organizations that provide services for the homeless. In 2011, Manhattan Borough president Scott Stringer proclaimed him an Artist and Activist against Homelessness. Born in Brooklyn, New York, he currently resides in Queens with his wife of two years.
“Sometimes a father’s love goes way beyond the words and the things that his children might see,” my mom said with tears in her eyes. “Everyone has a different way of expressing love. Of course, some ways are healthier than others, but sometimes parents repeat what they learned from their life experiences and struggles. That doesn’t mean that your father didn’t love you.”
I thought deeply about all the things my mom said, the things my father did and didn’t do, who he was and who he wasn’t. It helped me to realize that though my father hadn’t loved me the way I wanted him to, he had loved me in the best way he could. I couldn’t condone all he had done, but I decided to let go of the fear and pain that had held me back for so long.
By accepting my father, I began my journey toward understanding love.

Maher Reham (pen name) is a poet and an applications developer.
We loved each other, but we didn’t like each other. I respected her passion. Her discipline. Her generosity. She was a good person. She knew I was doing everything I could to take care of her. We often said, “I love you, and I want to make this work.” That we’d never found anyone else like each other. Despite the lack of sex, we showed affection through frequent kisses and hugs. But we couldn’t be a in a room together for more than a day without a world war breaking out.
For years, I kept thinking, “Is marriage supposed to be like this?” I sought advice from elders in the community, but no one gave me anything concrete. It was always, “Marriage is a struggle, gotta deal with it. It will get better.” But when?
I felt a tremendous amount of injustice. What am I getting from this marriage? My sexual frustration coupled with my humiliation and failure as a man made me tense all the time.
The last straw came six years into our marriage.

Mohammed Samir Shamma was born in 1972 to an Egyptian father and an American mother from Lamesa, Texas. His father died when he was nine and his mother raised him and his younger brother in Houston. Mohammed holds a master of arts degree in Middle Eastern studies from the University of Texas, Austin and a master of information management and systems degree from the University of California, Berkeley. During the day, Mohammed writes code intended for computers, but at night, after his two kids, Kareem and Leila, are asleep, he writes and illustrates stories. His work is at http://mohammedshamma.com/
In the years following my father’s death I slowly realized that my devotion to family and religion, like my own blood supply, was limited. After isha was over and my mother and brother were asleep, I would stare into my father’s bathroom mirror at the signs of puberty arriving on my skin, and hear them in my voice, praying for manhood to come soon. By the eighth grade, I thought I was ready. I prayed to Allah that a girl like Stephanie, Sarah, or Angela would notice me and that my mother wouldn’t learn about the semi-innocent games of truth or dare, or the middle school parties with make-out sessions to the sounds of mix tapes.
During my freshman year of high school I was lucky enough to have friends with cars—Muslim friends who kept my mother blind to the binge drinking and sleepovers. She eventually caught on and tried to hide her pain. Her angelic son was dead and all that was left was a hormonal halfling heaving under the covers with heathen girls. She tried to rein me back with a fire-and-brimstone version of Islam that she, the former Baptist from pure-white West Texas cotton country, could relate to. I tried to placate her, but I would never be as good as my father. I was a native Texan with an Arab name—the son of a dead Muslim survived by his proselyte.

Anthony Springer Jr. is a freelance writer, communications professional, and questioner of everything. He received his bachelor’s and master’s degrees in journalism and media Studies from the University of Nevada, Las Vegas. His work has appeared in HipHopDX.com, BET.com, TheWellVersed.com, Arena.com, Ultimate MMA magazine, and more. He currently blogs about mixed martial arts for the Yahoo! Contributor Network. He can be found on Twitter in a never-ending quest for intelligent dialogue @SimplyAnthony.
At the time of my conversion, in the fall of 2006, I was fresh out of college with my first job as a college recruiter at my alma mater, the University of Nevada, Las Vegas. I suppose a steady job and a degree made me a suitable candidate for marriage in the eyes of older brothers in the community, as it didn’t take long for the “M” word to come up. I sheepishly brushed off most of the marriage conversations, opting for a smile and an “inshAllah” when asked when I was taking a step, which felt more like walking the plank than fulfilling half my deen.
After all, I was an eligible bachelor who still occasionally partook in the vices of life. And as a twenty-two-year-old, very Western convert, the idea that I was supposed to find the love of my life without “dating” was more foreign than the Arabic that penetrated my ears the first time I heard the Qur’an recited at the masjid. Then there was the pressure—the pressure on brothers to get married is as strong as the pressure put on sisters. Or so it was in my case. Equality and resistance made for strange bedfellows.

Yousef “Dr. Yo-Yo” Turshani is an assistant clinical professor of pediatrics at the University of California, San Francisco. He and his wife, Nadeah Vali, Esq. continue their journey together. After Nadeah’s time at The Hague, she joined him in Zimbabwe on their first anniversary. They currently reside in Micronesia on the island of Saipan, where they work with the underserved, scuba dive, cook, and pray together. They have couch-surfed in Japan, Indonesia, Malaysia, and Singapore and now open their home to travelers.
Each time I’d been in a serious relationship, I wanted to include my parents. They accepted that I wasn’t eager to be “set up” with a family friend, as is the norm in Libya. They didn’t want to show up on the wedding day to accept complete strangers into our family, either. Yet, each time I introduced them to a woman, they had complaints about her that seemed arbitrary or unfounded.
Nadeah and I transformed from giddy fiancés into a bickering couple. She’d descended into the never-ending winter of her Cleveland law school; I had eighty-hour weeks of pediatric intensive care in San Francisco. This didn’t leave much time for listening to each other’s woes, let alone dealing with two increasingly disillusioned sets of parents living in different parts of the country.
I was in the on-call room during a twenty-four-hour shift when I got Nadeah’s phone call.
“Yousef, I just can’t do this anymore. I can’t marry into a family that rejects me with a husband who won’t stand up for me.”